A new resource launched by the US Federal Government today will provide a big boost to citizen science efforts in America.

The Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Toolkit is designed to help government agencies — and anyone else who cares to learn from the publicly accessible site — properly design, launch, and track citizen science and crowdsourcing projects.

The kit includes a step-by-step listing of best practices, links to related laws and policies, and a fairly extensive resource library.

More interesting for citizen science advocates, the kit also includes more than two dozen case studies of successful citizen science projects. The intent of the case studies is to spotlight success stories, and demonstrate the value of citizen science to both science and society in general.

Indeed, according to an official memorandum from John P. Holdren of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), there is also quantifiable economic value in citizen science. “Citizen science and crowdsourcing projects can enhance scientific research and address societal needs while drawing on previously underutilized resources. For example, after analyzing 338 citizen science biodiversity projects around the world, researchers at the University of Washington estimated that the in-kind contributions of 1.3–2.3 million citizen science volunteers to biodiversity research have an economic value of up to $2.5 billion per year.”

The release of the toolkit coincides with an official policy announcement from OSTP, which encourages government agencies to name a citizen science coordinator, and list their citizen science projects on a new central database to make it easier for citizens to find projects.

Funding agencies are slowly catching up with the citizen science movement. In today’s post, I round up some sources for citizen science grants and other funding sites to help you or your organization get a project off the ground. If you have additional US grant sources, or grants available in other regions around the world, please contact me and I’ll add them here!

Pybossa bills itself as “the only open source framework for making crowdsourcing projects.” The goal of the software is to allow organizers to complete huge tasks in record time with the help of volunteers.

Programmed in Python and based on the University of California at Berkeley’s Bossa project (the same organization that built BOINC), the framework is good for tasks that require human cognition at scale. This might include things like image classification, transcription, and geocoding. Some projects that are powered by Pybossa include Micropasts and ForestWatchers.

The software comes with a guide to getting started and a few templates to get you going; just using those, you could set up something to transcribe PDF docs, do sound pattern recognition, or phone-based data collection. The full documentation can be found here.

CKAN is data hub software that allows organizations (e.g., national and regional governments, companies, researchers, etc.) to quickly and easily publish datasets. It also allows users to share, find, and use data.

The open source code has a fairly extensive feature set. Publishers can publish data via an API, or by importing their data files. They can add metadata, visualize the data with maps, graphs, and tables, and look at analytics to see how users are making use of the data. There is also version control (so publishers know when there has been a change to a dataset) and custom data hub themes (so publishers can customize the look of their portal).

Data users can comment on datasets, “follow” them and be notified of updates, and share information via Twitter or Facebook.

Poplus has more to do with civic engagement than citizen science, but the principles behind the software and the tools I’m linking to here are the same. Poplus calls itself “an international movement that promotes the sharing of software for civic and democratic purposes.” The movement is predicated on the belief that citizens have universal basic civic needs, no matter where they live. With that in mind, volunteers with the movement have created “components” that developers can use, modify, and customize, without having to reinvent the wheel.

“Why should every organization have to write their software from scratch?” organizers note on the Poplus website. “By sharing code, we can make things quicker and easier, freeing up time for the important things.”

Current Poplus components include PopIt, a tool to make it easy to make and maintain lists of politicians and their basic biographical information; SayIt, which allows you to present transcripts online so that they are viewable, linkable, searchable, and shareable; and WriteIt, which provides an easy way for users to contact people in power by matching users to their representatives using just one piece of information.

EpiCollect is software that is designed for data collection. For simple projects, EpiCollect allows you to create a project website, design forms for text and photo data collection, load the app into a mobile platform, collect data, and view the data.

For more complex projects, EpiCollect+ allows you to build a project that can do all of the above, collect all types of media (photos, sounds, videos, etc.), download the data, and create forms with logic (e.g., you can skip questions based on user answers).

The software currently supports both Android and iOS.

EpiCollect was developed at Imperial College London and is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

What other tools (software, hardware, other) are there that would allow you to roll your own citizen science project? Post your links in the comments below!